Activate Your Practice Podcast
The Activate Your Practice Podcast is hosted by the Chairman & Founder of Activator Methods, Dr. Arlan Fuhr. This podcast will cover a variety of subjects. Dr. Fuhr will interview guests from different backgrounds and professions, as well as talk about his 50+ years in chiropractic care.
Activate Your Practice Podcast
Diving Into the World of Animal Chiropractic: Insightful Conversations with Dr. Susan Roecker
What if you had the ability to provide your pets with a level of care that goes beyond the usual vet visits? Join us for an intriguing conversation with Dr. Susan Roecker, a seasoned animal practitioner and supervisor of the Integrated Veterinarian Pain Management Center, as we journey into the world of animal chiropractic. Discover how this specialized form of care, with roots dating back to the inception of chiropractic, is revolutionizing pet care. Listen in as Dr. Roecker delves into the art, science, and philosophy of animal chiropractic, sharing fascinating insights about how adjusting animals differs from humans and how to interpret signs of discomfort in our furry friends.
Are you curious about how often your pets need to be adjusted or what reactions to expect? Tune in as we talk about the intricacies of pet adjustments and the significance of a stable, non-slip surface. Learn about the presence of orthopedic issues and contraindications where adjusting may not help, and hear real-life stories about the positive impact of this practice. We also shed light on the legal aspect of animal chiropractic, and how laws vary from state to state. This insightful episode is a must-listen for any animal lover keen on providing the best possible care for their beloved pets!
Welcome to the activate your practice podcast. I'm Dr Four. Data always wins. Hi, I'm Dr Arlen Four. Welcome to activate your practice. And this morning that we have a completely different type guest, that we have an animal practitioner, dr Susan Roker. Dr Roker is the supervisor of the integrated veterinarian pain management center and it's located in St Louis or the St Louis area in Missouri. The name of it is the Animal Medical Center of Mid America and I said it's located in St Louis, missouri. Welcome, dr Roker.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I'm glad to be here. I'm sure this is going to be very informative for everyone interested in animal chiropractic.
Speaker 1:You know we just now have the first animal chiropractic that Dr Roker did and it's out for continuing education approval. You might have to check. There's a couple of states that you want to see if they allow it. But let me ask you a question what is animal chiropractic?
Speaker 2:Sure. So animal chiropractic is much like what we do with our human patients. We adjust the spine extremities and everything. For the animal patient it is a little bit different because they are on all fours so they have more of a sheer force than the humans have, more compressive forces. The animal chiropractic has been around since the inception of chiropractic. So BJ Palmer actually did a lot of adjusting for animals, especially circus animals in his area, and so recently, as recent as 1986, Dr Sharon Willoughby, who is a chiropractor as well as a veterinarian, started animal chiropractic back up again for chiropractors and veterinarians to learn the science, art and philosophy of animal chiropractic.
Speaker 1:So this is nothing new.
Speaker 2:Right yeah.
Speaker 1:It's been around for a while. This all got started because my wife said In her former life she raised race horses, and when we met she said well, I had people using activators on our race horses, so I'm familiar with what an activator is. And so she said we need to put this out because there's a lot of people out there that even want to adjust their own pets, which I have, two miniature snauzers and one of them got hurt and I had to call somebody and get a walk through so I could adjust their front shoulder to get back together. That was you, and so explain the four chorus activator for the small animal.
Speaker 2:So we created with activator. We created a kind of introductory course for chiropractors to use the techniques with the activator instrument for their small animal patient at home. This course is only four hours so it's not going to satisfy what some of the laws are requiring as far as education goes with animal chiropractic. So ideally it's for those owners to use that at home. But it is a good introductory course on how to use the instrument to adjust your dog or cat. It's not a technique course like activator, it's more how to use the instrument to adjust your animal. So we can't tell Fluffy to put their right hand on their lower back and bring it back down, left hand on their lower back and bring it back down. So we had to create something where you can kind of motion, palpate and figure out where you need to adjust the animal.
Speaker 1:What are some of the special considerations for a small animal patient?
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of things to consider when we want to adjust our small animal patient. So a lot of times we want to make sure that they're on a steady, non-slip surface. We also need to consider that they have little teeth and if they're not too happy with us or if we find a painful area that they could actually injure us or have a negative reaction. So we want to take that into consideration and kind of like how when we adjust somebody's hand, we kind of hold on to their hand and then use the instrument to kind of provide some stability to that area. We kind of have to do the same for the animal patient.
Speaker 1:How often does a pet need to be adjusted?
Speaker 2:So usually animals don't need as many adjustments or as frequently as our human patients. Again, they don't have the compressive forces like we do. Since we're upright, we have a lot more compression on our spine, whereas the dogs and cats have more of a sheer force because their spine is lateral, and so usually for a healthy animal that's not prone to injury once a month, once every other month, some of them even once every six months kind of depends on their activity level and if they're prone to getting injured themselves.
Speaker 1:What do you expect to see from your pet after the adjustment?
Speaker 2:So it's a wide variety of reactions from the adjustment. I have some patients that go home after the adjustment and they go to sleep, whereas others get kind of a burst of energy and they kind of run around and are a lot more active than they normally are after the adjustment.
Speaker 1:How is adjusting an animal different than a human? Thank you for watching.
Speaker 2:So the animal patient? They obviously can't tell us kind of where they're having any discomfort. They can't tell us, you know, hey, my right shoulder hurts or anything like that. So we have to do a good job, kind of motioning and palpating, kind of feeling where those restrictions are versus the human patient. They can say, oh right, here they point to an area this hurts. And then again, like I said, the stabilization is pretty important with our small animal patients because they don't have enough inherent stability to provide that for the adjustment. So much like our human patients are laying on a table, our animal patients need some support whenever we're performing the adjustment.
Speaker 1:And that's what you're talking about when you talk about stabilization.
Speaker 2:Correct. Yeah, you just want to support that kind of almost if you think about the table catching the force of the adjustment instead of those muscles kind of holding them up. We have to support the dogs to where they're kind of non weight bearing in that situation, in the areas that we adjust.
Speaker 1:Are there contraindications or orthopedic issues that adjusting will not help.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. Just like with our human patients, the animal patients can have ligament tears, they can have cancers, they can have paralysis and a bunch of different other things. I don't go through all of those contraindications in the webinar, but if you obviously need to get your pets checked out by the veterinarian first and then if there is something that can be adjusted moving from there. So whenever a dog has a disc herniation, theirs is definitely a lot more severe than our disc herniations. So humans will get like the sciatic symptoms or they'll get the nerve pain shooting down like an arm or a leg, Whereas with the disc herniation and a dog especially, like those toxins, they can actually become paralyzed. They lose deep pain, they lose their ability to control their bowel and bladder. So when we see patients like that, that's more of an emergent situation and they do need to go see their veterinarians in those cases.
Speaker 1:I have personally seen some people you know people, dogs that have had like legs go bad on them, their hind legs, and I think that's what you're talking about, isn't it? And I've seen those adjusted and they came out of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I have two and I've done quite a few of them. Actually, my first chiropractic patient after I had gone through the animal chiropractic program was a paralyzed dog that actually had been down for two weeks. She was not a surgical candidate. She was evaluated by her veterinarians to make sure that she was cleared to go ahead with the adjustment and I was able to get her up and walking again and she didn't have any negative effects after the adjustment and getting her back up and walking.
Speaker 1:Are there laws regarding animal chiropractic? Again, where do you find information on those?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there are laws almost in every state.
Speaker 2:They range from anywhere like Iowa and New York, where a chiropractor is not allowed to adjust an animal, all the way to like Oklahoma has their own animal chiropractic board and they're in charge of making sure that the people that have got the animal chiropractic license have completed the IVCA or AVCA certification exam and completed the 210 hours worth of education that's required to receive those certifications, and so most of the time when you're looking to find out what your laws in your state are going to say, you do need to look at the veterinary board and their recommendations on the laws.
Speaker 2:Right now, missouri actually just passed an animal chiropractic revision where we don't have to have immediate supervision meaning a veterinarian has to be within eyesight and ear sight of me performing the adjustment but now to being under the chiropractic board and needing a veterinary referral. So the laws are changing. Most of them, like I said, are requiring a certification for the IVCA or the AVCA, which the course that I created does not qualify for because it's only four hours, which is just a small, like I said, just an introductory class as far as animal chiropractic goes.
Speaker 1:Well, and that's what this was created for, because we had so many of our doctors say when are you going to do an animal course? And boy, we got into it and it was complicated from the law standpoint and we didn't want to go into anything where we're going to violate the law, obviously, and we didn't want to make veterinarians mad at us. That wasn't our goal. But we thought we could put out, just as you say, a small four hour course on in case your little pet gets hurt. At least you'd have a general idea of knowing where to go and what to do.
Speaker 1:Like I told you, I have two little schnauzers. They're part of my family, you know, and there's so many people out there that they said when are you going to show us what to do with an instrument? And so we thought we'll give them an introduction. Then, if they want to go into the other organizations, which we're all in favor of, then fine, then you can go get certified and, you know, really get into it. And I know some. I'm from Arizona, so there are people here that adjust. You know horses and all kinds of different things, because we have race tracks and things like that here. So there's a lot of animal chiropractic going on, but I think now we're going to let people see more about it, look into it and find a good way for them to go. What were the big things that you taught in this four hour course, do you think? What would you say?
Speaker 2:So I would say initially we kind of go through again the laws where, if you are interested in finding more information out about animal chiropractic, where those resources are available and if you want to go further in the certification, it also goes through the laws a little bit too on where to find information on that. I also go through kind of the different directionality terms that are used in animals versus people, so like dorsal is the back instead of posterior and that kind of thing. And then we go through the different parts of the body and kind of how to provide those adjustments if we do find some restrictions in there. So you know, a lumbar vertebrae adjustment, we're going to do a straight D to V type adjustments, and so we just kind of segmentally go through the pelvic area, the lumbar area, thoracic and so on.
Speaker 1:So Well, I remember when you shot it. I believe you had a plastic dog and that was how you were able to show people where to make the contact points and things of that nature. So it's a very, as you say, a beginner's course. It's a simple course and it's a design for you to get an introduction into animal adjusting.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's what the whole program was all about.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, and I know that there's a lot of chiropractors that have been doing this for a while, you know, just because they've kind of played around with it, and this gives them just a little bit more information on how to do that safely and effectively. I've talked to some that never even considered the stabilization that that could help them in their adjustments for their pets.
Speaker 1:Just a few good ideas and, by the way, as I said, it counts for continuing education. So if it's just something you'd like to learn and you want some CE credits, that they're available. You have to look. There's a couple of states that don't allow CE credits, but we made that very clear and you can see that so well. Anything else, dr Roker, that you'd like to say?
Speaker 2:I think that kind of covers it. If you guys have any questions or concerns or anything like that, I'd be happy to answer those via email or anything like that. That would be fine too.
Speaker 1:Good. Just a side note here. Dr Roker spoke at Logan Symposium. She's a Logan graduate and she spoke at the symposium where we had over 500 people and she had 400 people in her class, so that shows you that there's a big interest in this and people came out of there saying, wow, that was just such a good introduction. So thank you, Dr Roker I know you're busy in your hospital there and so taking the time out and just really want to appreciate what you do and for helping everybody learn more about their pets.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. I really enjoy interviewing people. I think I found my new thing here. I enjoy especially things that are brand new, like Dr Roker said on animal adjusting, and so you can adjust your pets, if nothing else, and hope that this is something interesting for you. Glad you met with us again today at the Activate your Practice podcast and we're going to be bringing you a lot of different subjects, everything from animals to we're going to talk a little bit about even knee replacements things. I went through one of those with my wife. We look forward to you tuning in again. Thank you.
